This article argues that the American TV-series The Wire poses complicated political and ideological questions rather than attempting to deliver clear-cut answers or solutions to the problems represented. The Wire is analysed both as an aesthetic phenomenon (narratological and thematic analysis) and as a representation of societal elements (which demands analysis based on sociological, historical and criminological perspectives). After a brief overview of the series, the authors aim to generalise the results of the analysis of a particular part of the five-season series, namely the “Hamsterdam-episode”.
Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too.
Ecocriticism has grown into one of the most innovative and urgent fields of the humanities, and many useful ecocritical approaches for addressing our environmental crisis have been developed, discussed, and reconsidered during the last decade.
From various perspectives, ecocriticism both adopts and criticizes traditional analytical and theoretical models, resulting in an impressive methodological diversity, pushing the boundaries of the humanities. Contemporary Ecocritical Methods exemplifies this methodological variety and serves as a practical entry into the field. Fourteen chapters, written by scholars from various ecocritical sub-fields of environmental humanities, introduce a rich set of perspectives and their analytical tools.
En diskusssion af muligheden for at benytte Bachtin i en medieteoretisk kontekst, med särligt henblik på spörgsmålet om intermedialitet
En teoretisk diskussion af Bachtin som intermedialitetsteoretiker.
The Scandinavian middle classes have been trained in feeling guilty and shameful about their social and economical privileges as well as these privileges in combinations with gender and/ or ethnicity. But "eco-guilt" or "eco-shame" has hardly been represented properly in cinema and TV series to this day. In this article, I want to offer a kind of prediction, rather than a description, of what may be an upcoming major theme in Scandinavian visual narratives: eco-guilt and eco-shame. I see signs of this in the recent TV series Jordskott from Sweden, the Norwegian Okkupert and the Danish Bedrag, but my point will be that the ecological issues here are used as a useful background or a dramaturgical starting point rather than as a major theme: as pretexts, in the double sense of the word. The use of ecology as pretext in Scandinavian TV series will be the subject of this article where I intend to focus on the way that the question of eco-guilt seems to be an alluring and tempting as well as repressed thematic, a fact that can be read out of the three series' paradoxical opening sequences.
En diskussion av den svenska författaren Daniel Boyacioglu utifrån hans självframställning och utifrån ideen om en "mindre litteratur" (Deleuze)
En diskussion av Chrétien de Troyes' poetik utifrån modern tekstteori och medeltida föreställningar om fiktion och litteratur.
En diskussion af det teoretiske begreb heteromedialitet (en videreudvikling af intermedialitetsbegrebet) med särligt henblik på repräsentationen af androgynitet i värker af Virginia Woolf, Sally Potter, Iain Banks.
En diskussion av Nobelpristagare Imre Kertész som "postderrideansk" författare, speciellt utifrån hans förhållande till historie-skrivning och iden om att "vittna".
This article is an introduction to the edited issue of Ekphrasis that publishes selected and rewritten versions of papers presented at the international conference "Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Anthropocene Ecological Crisis across Media and the Arts" that took place in Cluj, Romania, in August 2019. Taking as its starting point the by now well-established fact that the ecological crisis defines our current moment and threatens our planetary future, the article argues that environmental humanities is in need of a research agenda that is able to systematically study, compare and criticize many different ecomedia products from a wide range of media types. The article argues that major insights from intermedial studies ought to be combined with the basic ideas of contemporary ecocriticism, and the article briefly outlines an intermedial ecocritical research agenda. Also, the article offers brief introductions to the 12 articles of this special issue, which covers a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the intersections of intermedial studies and ecocriticism. The articles deal with a wide variety of different media types, from scientific articles and social media articulations and to blockbuster cinema, narrative literature, TV-series, Japanese manga documentary film.
This article argues that major insights from intermedial studies and ecocriticism could be combined in order to produce a productive theoretical and methodological position called Intermedial Ecocriticism. Intermedial Ecocriticism is built upon the simple observation that the production of scientific knowledge concerning the critical ecological condition in the Anthropocene reaches the laymen public by way of non-scientific texts in a number of different media types. This corpus — called ecomedia products — covers everything from popular scientific journalism, museum exhibitions or educational material, to literary climate fiction, visual art projects and documentary film or poetry. The main goal of Intermedial Ecocriticism is to be able to analyze, interpret and compare samples from this extensive and heterogeneous corpus of texts, thus going far beyond the tradition of ecocriticism to focus only on literary and other artistic texts. Thus, the position is meant to offer a humanities contribution to better understand and act upon the pending ecological crisis.
The first part of the article offers a general outline of theory and method of Intermedial Ecocriticism, whereas the second part exemplifies one particular concretization of the position. A videoanimation by Danish artist Per Arnoldi and two contemporary cli-fi novels by Mats Söderlund and Hanna Rut Carlsson are briefly analyzed and compared. The analysis focuses on the questions of narrativity and the representation of the possibility of human agency in the three ecomedia products.
Framtidens kulturvetenskap kommer kanske att vara intermedialitet, men då måste begreppet utvidgas och kompletteras ift dess nuvarande status och omfång.
Keynote föreläsning på doktorandkonferens: kritisk granskning av mediebegreppet och intermedialitetsteorin; introduktion av heteromedialitet
A critical reassesment of the five romances of the medieval writer Chrétien de Troyes, in particular from the viewpoint of the author's relation to chivalry, love, poetics, and violence
In this article I shall focus on the novel Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, briefly refer to a graphic novel by De Metter, and Scorseses film by the same name, as well as the compiled musical soundtrack for the film. I will discuss general methodological and theoretical questions raised by these works, but the entire discussion is directed towards Scorseses film (including its soundtrack) as well as the music of film generally: why did Scorsese and his team choose such a relatively special soundtrack for the film; what is the role of music in the general adaptation process of turning a novel into film; and what is the relation between the musical soundtrack and the originating novel? Madness, I will argue, will be part of both the problem and the answer to the methodological and theoretical investigations, and I will argue that we ought to consider music as an important aspect in Scorseses Shutter Island, and that my specific discussion will have repercussions beyond the study of this particular novel and film.
A discussion of the various adaptions of the multivolume novel of French author Marcel Proust to the medium of film.
Taking as my starting point the intermedial idea that all literary texts exhibit some kind of medial mixture, the article argues that Vladimir Nabokov's formally exquisite and existentially moving short story Spring in Fialta (which I analyze in Nabokov's own English translation from Russian) is best understood when it is considered a mixed mediality text. I hope to demonstrate the general idea that when a conventionally literary text is being read as a medially mixed text the role of media turns out to be crucial for the understanding of the entire text. More specifically, I shall argue that the schism between artistic representation and life in itself, condensed into the problem of how to represent and recall memory traces, is a major theme in Spring in Fialta.